NOTE: This was made with Canon G9. I was by myself and having trouble getting the items into focus while I held the camera with one hand and the gear with the other. It’s very low production quality. Watch at your own risk.

Very informative video in this travel-unfriendly day and age.
I am curious why you don’t think much of Moose Peterson. I have met him and he seems somewhat abrasive although his pictures are quite striking sometimes.
Good luck on your trip.

@Danny I use the Air strictly to offload cards and then I use Aperture to look at and mark for deletion any images I know I won’t keep. The rest gets exported as a project and imported into my main library for further editing and finalization. I do occasionally use Photoshop, but not often.

Great video, thanks for taking the time to show us what it takes. I’m really really looking forward to the “sensor” cleaning video using the pen. I can’t imagine how it can be so clean relative to pixel sensor size using the pen.

Scott, thanks for taking the time to walk us through your gear for the Alaska trip, it was helpful to see what you packed. In an upcoming episode could you all chat about teleconverters for the zoom and telephoto lenses (i.e. what ones you like, and what you don’t like about using teleconverters with the particular lenses you use). Thanks and hope you get some great shots in Alaska.

It’s always great to see how other photographers pack to head up to Alaska!
Although you are going a bit more remote than either of my trips up North (One in Sept. the Other in Jan. – Mar. for 8 weeks in Fairbanks!). When we flew out to shoot the bears, ours were day trips and we could leave gear at a land-based location. Funny, we were limited to roughly 13-15lb/per person on the float plane, and we were on a 12-passenger plane. (although, I did manage to “sneak” on my non-carbon fiber tripod & 500mm lens…)
Is your trip a special charter?
Will you be doing more video-diary type stuff from this trip? Or just writing about it?

None-the-less, that is some smart packing.
Best of luck for weather & subject matter co-operation!
Hope you come back with some great stuff. Looking forward to reading/viewing more from this trip?

—michael

…you know, speaking of weather, You didn’t have any wet weather coverage for your gear?
I know the LensCoat stuff helps (I also have these & Love them!), but it doesn’t do much with serious rain! Just curious…

Scott, I was a little worried by your warning that the video was going to be unwatchable, but it was decent quality, and got the point accross. It really made me think about getting the G9 now for some video as well as the great pictures it can take. I was really curious as to what you were going to be taking along, and this filled the bill! As a small request, down the road, I think it would be interesting to see what/how you pack for a trip closer to home, like say a day to a local park or something. I would not expect anything soon as you are clearly busy for a while here, but I think it would be an interesting video for the future. Thanks again!

Man that REI bag seems to have a lot in it… Just how much did that weigh?
What does that bag weigh empty? I find that to be the biggest drawback in selecting a bag large and sturdy enough to carry my clothing, personals, tripod (& Wemberly head), and extra gear… some of the better built bags are already at 10 pounds Empty, so getting to 50 doesn’t take much…
Glad to hear you have the Think Tank cover. Is that the new Hydrophobia?
Be interesting to see others using that… Video of that setup would be cool!
Personally, I love this on my 500mm. Great folks there too.

@Scott You did mention it, two or three times. I think you referred to it as “Gitzo” without the word tripod once or twice. Enjoyable video; there’s something about org/packing pr0n…

And the quality was fine; the lack of a studio & a few grand of gear doesn’t matter for this type of thing. I’d wager the same thing for your in-the-field audio recorder, but that might also just be my gear-jealousy.

Scott,
As everyone has said, thanks so much for taking the time to shoot the video and pack and unpack the bags. As both a gear and bag nut is was a learning experience. Hopefully it will be posted as a twip video podcast. Extremely good image and sound quality on the G9, and all with one hand! best of luck on the trip, can’t wait to see the pix. Good health to you.

Thanks for the video Scott. That really helps those of us just starting out with Wildlife Photography by providing some guidance on limiting gear selection to just what’s necessary for the type of trip planned and how to pack it all.

I was wondering if you had thought about including something like a 8 or 10mm fisheye lens for some landscape work and why you had ruled it out if it was under consideration ?

Also, was a 600mm F4 not taken because it would be too much lens for bears ? I would think it would allow you to stay a little further away and still fill up the frame. Just curious.

@Gregg I took the 14-24 F/2.8 thinking that was wide enough and of course, my focus was bears so longer lenses were the order of the day.

I didn’t take the 600 for several reasons.

1) It didn’t arrive at my office until the day after I left :)
2) It’s heavier than the 200-400 and I had reason to believe we’d be close enough that the 200-400 with 1.7 TC would do the job, and most of the time it did.

Scott, just curious why you didn’t bring the 2nd D3 for redundancy? If your D3 glitched, and that one battery for the D700 died, you’d be in bad shape… I’d have left the short zoom at home to take the 2nd D3.

@Jeremy trying to save space and weight – and also wanted to put the D700 through its paces. I hadn’t really gotten much chance to use it since it is just a backup body. When the D3X is announced soon, it will probably be my fourth body…. meaning even less use.